Thread: "Lucid Dreams" Celia Green (1968)

Looks like a cool book, you gonna scan it in for us?

Sure

I have a program on my PC called FineReader, i will scan is some pages for people to read.

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What is a lucid dream? Here is an example:

Without any preliminary ordinary dream experience, I suddenly found myself on a fairly large boat travelling at a normal speed up what appeared to be the mouth of a river, just before it issues into the sea. There was some sort of pleasant scenery on either side, with trees and greenery, and straight in front, the water stretched to infinity. The deck was smooth and clean and warmed by the sun, and I felt the warm breeze on my skin. This startled me, because I knew that in a dream one does not feel actual physical sensations with the same intensity and subtlety as in real life, and I was sufficiently mistress of my own thoughts and movements to pinch my arm in order to assure myself that it was only a dream. I felt the flesh under my fingers and the slight pain in my arm, and this filled me with real alarm, because I knew that I ought not to be on that boat, in the daylight. I did not see my own body, but I was sufficiently lucid to imagine it, lying inert in my own bed here in Paris . . .

A lucid dream is a dream in which the subject is aware that he is dreaming.
Plainly a lucid dream constitutes something of a test case. Dreaming is usually defined by reference-to its irrationality and discontinuity with waking experience. That is to say, the events of the dream do not obey the usual laws of the physical world and the subject does not relate what is happening to memories of his past life and of the normal world, so that the dream is 'discontinuous' with the rest of his experience.
Certain subjects claim that in lucid dreams they retain the greater part, or even all, of the memories which they possess n the waking state. If this is so, the 'discontinuity of personal experience' is evidently at a minimum.

Further, some lucid dreams seem to be very accurate imitations of waking life. The case which has been quoted at the beginning of this chapter is an example of this. In this case, we might say that there was no discontinuity with the physical world of ordinary experience other than an apparent displacement of the observer's point of view to a different spatial location.

If the dreamer dreams that he is lying in bed in his own bedroom, as is sometimes reported, even this discontinuity is absent.

A further problem arises about the use of the word' aware', or its synonym 'conscious'. In our definition, we said that a person having a lucid dream is' aware that he is dreaming.' But Malcolm observes: '. . . Having some conscious experience or other, no matter what, is not what is meant by being asleep . . .'l It certainly seems very odd to say that the subject quoted at the beginning of this chapter was not 'conscious' at the time of the experience described. The problem might be solved by distinguishing between ' physiological unconsciousness' and 'psychological unconsciousness'. 'Physiological unconsciousness' might be defined as a state characterized by unresponsiveness to certain external stimuli, 'Psychological unconsciousness' would be more difficult to define. It is difficult to state any criterion of un-criticalness, amnesia, unawareness and so on, which is not found at times in a ' normal waking' state.
In the next chapter we shall be discussing a type of experience related to lucid dreams, which may also take place while the subject exhibits complete behavioural unconsciousness.

I will post more when i have more time, if people want to read more....

Good read!

Wow,this is 4 years before I joined this forum

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